A Response to the Drug War

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Thursday, September 19, 2013, 11:44am

Presentation at annual dinner of Marin Task Force on the Americas

By John Lindsay-Poland, Fellowship of Reconciliation

It is extraordinary that such a deep, broad and intense opposition to extended war has, for now, stopped those who would have expanded the war in Syria that has caused so much suffering. Like many of you, my attention in the last week has been riveted to news and grappling with how to stop this escalation of war in the Middle East. It can be easy to shift our eyes away from ongoing concerns and events in Latin America and US policy there when the public has a chance to weigh in on another war.

I’d like to remind us of what occurred in the mid-1960s, when the escalation of war in Vietnam and the draft and the B-52 sorties were compelling attention here and around the world. At that same time, US forces were training what became the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, setting up the structures for the massive bloodletting that followed then and in the 1980s. It must have been lonely for the US missionaries and others who called out that violence at the time, but their work became a ground for movements that followed in the 1970s and 1980s to support human rights and stop US intervention in Central America that did, indeed, have an important impact on US policy.

I know many of us feel overwhelmed by the forces and news of destruction that stream toward us, into us, each day. Instead of offering you a ton of data about US military programs, I’d like to explore how we get to the other side of despair. That despair, after all, is often what leads people to alcohol and drug abuse, or for that matter to the psychic candy of digital entertainment - to create numbness, to seek some tiny pleasures.

If you believe that you can’t change something, and there’s some terrible and ongoing act, and there’s this frustrating effort to shift the debate without influence or power, you adapt to those acts. If you are correct in thinking that you can’t change the debate, it is actually a rational thing, to believe that you can’t stop it, and therefore you might not act in that situation.

The problem is, the more you choose to adapt to these terrible acts, the more you become complicit with them. This is why denunciation is so important, even when you believe, correctly, that denouncing the killing will not stop it from happening.

Yet, denunciation without relationship, without change, becomes bitter. Only human relationship can produce change in human behavior. And I think it is transformation of our own lives and relationships that we’re seeking.

First let me offer some background on drug policy, and what it is we hope to change.

To begin with, the laws themselves are incoherent. They’re not based on what substance addictions produce the most damage – legal alcohol and prescription drug damage clearly outweigh the damage produced by cocaine or heroin, not to mention marijuana, if we measure the damage in terms of emergency room admissions, deaths, health care costs, or family dysfunction.

Much of the problem of the drug war, however, also lies in enforcement, which includes many discretionary choices about resources, targets, and priorities. More than 17 million people in the United States have used marijuana in the last month, and “only” 62,000 of them were arrested. I used it in the last year, and wasn’t arrested. No drug warrior is suggesting that all 17 million users be placed in a guarded cage. So how will we select who gets locked up, and who runs for elected office, or goes to human rights dinners?

The answer lies in whose lives are valued, and whose are dispensable, or just invisible. As Michelle Alexander says, “in the drug war, the enemy is racially defined.” So even though data shows that white people use illegal drugs just as much people of color, three quarters of those imprisoned for drug offenses are Black or Latino – who represent just 30% of the US population.

Another problem of the drug war is that success in controlling supply doesn’t reduce misery, it simply moves it around – often spreading it to new regions. That is true of trafficking/organized crime AND consumption of narcotics. So, successful campaigns against growing coca leaves in Bolivia and Peru in the 1980s moved coca to Colombia, where it fed the war. Operations in the Caribbean moved trafficking to the mainland of Central America and Mexico, where we are seeing the results now. And when the military and law enforcement are successful at stopping narcotics from crossing the border – into the United States, but into other countries as well – the industry has a stronger incentive to create a local market, so consumption of narcotics increases in countries where it wasn’t used much before.

Moreover, because of high levels of hypocrisy and the enormous resources generated in an illegal market, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between traffickers and law enforcement. The tactics and weapons used converge, and the logic of the market – expressed in the extreme by drug trafficking - leads traffickers to purchase special forces soldiers and police who have been trained by the state, and to purchase military weapons on the open U.S. gun market.

Yet another problem of the drug war is that… it is a war. This isn’t rhetorical any more. It means that opponents in the war are killed by “our” side. Such killing is permitted and legitimated by society and the state, even rewarded. Presumed innocence or assumed guilt for a crime becomes a matter of life and death.

We often think of drug traffickers as the initiators of conflict in the drug war, because they are the transgressors of drug laws. Didn’t they start this thing? In fact, the choice to create prohibition – historically in response to fears of racial minorities in this country – and the choice of very selective strategies for enforcement of prohibition are initiated by the state and society that are waging this war.

I’d like to show you a map produced by the US Southern Command of transnational crime, and deconstruct it with you. Nearly all the arrows in the Americas are going from Latin America north, into the United States. You could say this is a diagram of the question asked after the World Trade Center was destroyed: Why do they hate us?

Graphic: US Southern CommandNotice which arrows are the thickest – perhaps representing the most important criminal flows. The green ones represent cocaine and go from Central America and the Andes, to the United States and – not quite as thick arrows – to Europe. The money used to pay for cocaine, which is laundered and travels back to Latin America, is invisible. The next most prominent arrows are for heroin produced in Afghanistan, whose government is nearly entirely paid for by the United States – which is also invisible on this map -, and precursor chemicals produced in China. Also heading north into the United States are heroin from Mexico and Colombia and illegally trafficked migrants.

Increasingly not only are the discourses about drug trafficking and illegal immigration as threats to the United States joined together. But the military responses to these supposed threats are also joined. So, after the United States and Guatemala developed bilateral military relationships based on counter-drug operations, for the last six months the US military and Border Patrol officers from Texas trained Guatemalan police in border control operations, including “escalation of force” issues. “Escalation of force” refers to decisions about when officers can use more violence than their aggressors, such as shooting people throwing rocks. The Border Patrol has an egregious record on this issue – its agents have shot and killed 20 people along the border since 2010. BP claims that in 8 of these killings, agents were responding to rock-throwing.

This brings up another phenomenon – the growing number of US agencies involved in the drug war in Latin America. US Southern Command finances construction of military bases, overseen by the Army Corps of Engineers, and on these bases State Dept-owned helicopters deploy for DEA-run operations, sometimes using NSA-supplied intelligence. National Guard units from various states deploy to build things for Central American armies. The FBI has built a base in Puebla, Mexico. The US funds Colombian military trainers to train Guatemalan police. Last week US Marines were in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Belize, training militaries – especially naval forces – in counter-drug operations and infantry landings. Later we’ll find out more about intelligence agencies’ activities.

The agencies are supposed to be building capacity in partner militaries and police. That means they don’t have to own the military bases they build. It also means that this capacity can be used for other objectives besides going after organized crime. For example, the US is promoting the installation of surveillance technologies and passage of wiretap laws in Central America, by which Panamanian, Salvadoran and other nations’ police can listen in on suspects’ conversations. But we know it can be used for other purposes. And for all this capacity-building, not a single US agency is evaluating its impact on human rights.

If you look closely at this map, you’ll see a dashed orange line, from the United States into Mexico, representing illegally trafficked weapons. But that is the only indicator that the United States might have some internal problems that lead to international transgressions. That our population has the largest appetite for something, the outright prohibition of which our government is the leading promoter, is not represented. Appetites are not criminal, I guess; nor is the impulse to punish those who produce and move things to satisfy that appetite.

I’d like to tell some stories about relationships – about family, and institutions, and solidarity. Who is impacted by this war?

Margarita López is from Michoacán state, in Mexico, and her daughter, Yahaira Guadalupe, married a Mexican soldier and moved to a town in Tlacolula, Oaxaca. In April two years ago Yahaira was abducted by a group of armed men and disappeared.

Her neighbors were suspicious of Yahaira because she wasn’t from Oaxaca, she was from Michoacán. They came to her door and said they’d heard complaints she was beating her children. She told them she didn’t have children. She filed a complaint, but the police to whom she filed a complaint were working hand in hand with the Zetas criminal organization.

Margarita spent tens of thousands of dollars carrying out her own investigation into the disappearance of Yahaira, because the state does not investigate the vast majority of violent crimes. She disguised herself and hung out on a street with many prostitutes. She conducted two hunger strikes to press for a government investigation. She interviewed men in prison, charged with other crimes, who kidnapped her daughter. One of them told her that they’d held her for a week, tortured her, beheaded her, and buried her. The government produced a body without a head, but without the dentiture there was no way she could confirm her identity.

Last summer, Margarita and I participated in the Caravan for Peace that crossed the country from San Diego along the border, through the Southeast, up to Chicago to New York and arriving in Washington, DC. The Caravan focused on the different ways that the United States is connected to the violence occurring in the drug war in Mexico – the immigration policy that dehumanizes immigrants and treats them as a threat; the gun culture that makes military weapons easier to get than health care, supplying organized crime; the drug prohibition that escalates violence of any dispute within the industry, since you can’t exactly go to Small Claims Court; and the foreign policy that responds to everything with military contracts.

When the Caravan was in Houston, some people we knew went to a gun show and purchased an AK-47 and a pistol. The next day, in the searing summer heat, Margarita and several other Mexican victims of violence gave their testimonies about how guns were used against them. Then they destroyed these weapons in a public park, cutting them into pieces. They laid the pieces on a board, and one by one, the victims took a mallet to them, while we read the biblical passage about turning swords into ploughshares.

We were very quiet after that happened. And Margarita told me that when she pounded on the pieces of guns, it was as if all the rage she felt in her chest came out of her, and for the moment, it left her.

Two months ago, an Argentine forensics team finally confirmed that a body recovered in Oaxaca was Yahaira, and Margarita was able to bury her remains. But the government officials and military officers involved in her abduction haven’t been charged. Instead, she told me Friday, the army has pursued Margarita and her son, forcing them to move from place to place.

Consider the story of an Army squad in Colombia, where the US drug war in Latin America has had its central locus, with more than $8 billion spent by the US since Plan Colombia started in 2000, most of it on military and police assistance. It began under the guise of the drug war, but the mission was expanded after September 11 to include counterinsurgency, and US aid followed the Colombian military’s strategy. The success of this strategy was measured by body counts, even in areas where the guerrillas were scarce.

The Atila 1 unit of 29 men was on patrol in Cesar state in 2008 and saw a guerrilla camp from a distance. They could have fired, but the people they saw were unarmed, dressed as civilians. The area was mined, and when they arrived at the camp, most of the guerrillas had dispersed. Still, they recovered weapons, computers, food, and within three days the guerrillas surrendered.

But the unit was part of a battalion that has a record for killing civilians. When they got back to the base, their commander, Colonel Ramón Saldaña Quiñonez, cussed them out, saying guerrillas alive were no good for him, he needed kills in order to be promoted. A month later they were booted from the military, facing ongoing unemployment, while Col. Saldaña made it to a comfortable retirement. The men who refused to kill unarmed people say, “What happened to us occurred in a time in the Army when to be good was bad.”

The story of civilian killings in Colombia is terrible. More than 3,500 are under investigation by the Colombian Prosecutor General’s office. But when these killings became known, the resulting outrage contributed not only to the resignation of the Army commander, but to making the issue of extrajudicial killings important to the administration of President Obama.

We were able to engage the Obama administration on this, by working with Colombian human rights organizations to document, in a systematic way, what military units have been implicated in extrajudicial killings, and present that information to the State Department. The Leahy Law, named after Senator Patrick Leahy, prohibits US assistance to any foreign military or police unit if there is credible information that its members committed a gross human rights abuse. There is no waiver in the law, although it leaves its application to the State Department. In 2010, we published a report slamming the State Department for failing to apply Leahy Law in Colombia, showing that it would require suspending aid to nearly all brigades in the Colombian Army, and the State Department cut off all direct communication with me.

Last year, we re-established communication, with officials who weren’t around in 2010, and I learned they didn’t have our data on units implicated in killings, at least not in a way they could use it. This might seem incredible to you, but if the political will is not there, then the information is not gathered or is not gotten to the people in the government institutions that would use it.

So I offered to give them a database, and put together an excel file of 600 civilian killings in which the unit was identified and the source of information was public. In December, they told me that there were 12 Army units identified in our database that had been proposed for US assistance, and 10 of them had been excluded from assistance based on the data we gave them. In June I gave them an expanded list, and they also agreed that if we provide them information on commanders of the implicated units, then units that are currently under those officers’ command could also be suspended from US assistance.

People say that the Leahy Law is limited, is not implemented, that it doesn’t change the militarized approach to policy. It’s true that even when applied, it doesn’t change the total amount of a military package, only cuts off a unit. Or they ask how big the Mexican peace movement is, and the truth is it’s small. So are the Colombian peace communities. Really what I think they are asking is, How can we make systemic change? How do you make something that will have a broader impact?

We are working for systemic change, to move the policies and the premises underlying the policies for militarism and exploitation. Latin American presidents from Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico have called for a structural re-examination of global drug prohibition in the UN. It’s not like we don’t have proposals. For example, we’re working to re-frame the federal budget crisis known as sequestration as an opportunity to trim the funding of ineffective, wasteful and costly programs. The US Southern Command, which completed a $280 million construction of its complex in Florida in 2011, has a temporary reduction of 26% of its operating budget, a reduction that should be maintained and expanded.

We advocate zeroing out Pentagon budget authorities for the drug war, with a concomitant statutory change to de-emphasize interdiction and fumigation programs.

U.S. personnel should not be enforcing laws in other nations. The Drug Enforcement Administration is a militarized law enforcement agency with the largest U.S. law enforcement presence overseas, operating in 65 countries. We should establish Congressional oversight of the DEA.

The mandates of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and State Department Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs should be re-set to prioritize reducing homicides and other violence, and support for programs that don’t rely on incarceration or armed force.

Congress and the White House should initiate drug law reforms to reduce our prison population, and create a plan to redirect funds to addiction treatment, job generation for youth, education, and mental health programs, away from the federal Bureau of Prisons and enforcement of drug prohibition laws.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus annually drafts an alternative budget resolution. That resolution should propose explicitly moving funds for counter-narcotics out of military and federal law enforcement and prison agencies and into programs for treatment and jobs and education programs for youth.

But don’t break your heart on hopes for Congress! In the meantime, there are individuals, groups, communities for whom action makes a difference. That difference might mean that they don’t go down, not this time. Or it might mean that if they do go down, there is someone who knows their story, and will carry their memory. What would move you to act for them, with them, when they are in danger? Would you call that thing love?

It’s like the Tracy Chapman song:

If you knew that you would find a truthThat brings a pain that can’t be soothedWould you change?If you saw the face of God and loveWould you change?

How do you fall in love with a country or a people? The way I know is to meet them, to go out and connect with them. You might have to go through your fear and anger about what’s happening to go to them, but you do fall in love with them when you meet.

This is why I joined up with the Caravan for Peace of Mexicans and people from the U.S. last year. I don’t know how to communicate to you the multifaceted, beautiful and exhausting nature of the Caravan, its unrelenting creativity and pain, its affection and love of people both present and gone. Its logistics deep in water up to the nose, its crying out for change in a money-soaked and grey election year. It had the commitment of a diver, head into the pool, but done collectively, seeking our beauty, our national and personal identities faced toward power and whatever comes next. The tender grief of recent loss, longing for the beloved’s bones, the determination to know, to settle an account with those who took, those who profited from the blood and looked away. The fearless turning to face you, to face me, saying,

This is is what it is. Open. Open the case. Open your heart. Open the putrid systems ticking out our doom. Open the long-held cliches about Mexico, about the United States, about what’s possible. Open your hands. Open up your schedule. Open your mouth and say something true. Open the gates and locks to those heavy doors that separate and divide us. Open your deepest desire for something better. Open the crypt where your dreams for justice lay waiting.

You know how. You know it is wrong to force millions of young black men into cages. You know an AK-47 sold in Texas is not just for sport. You know you’ve leaned on something ingested to change your mood and feel better. That the triggerman and boss shouldn’t kill and walk freely and armed.